1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical consultation system and more particularly to a contemporaneous, multi-physician, online consultation system in which a user can obtain easily understandable medical opinions of many qualified, unbiased health care professionals and experts through the Internet. This system can provide information as to the sum of the opinions of medical professions for a variety of case scenarios and establish whether, and to what extent, a consensus of such opinions exists.
2. Description of Prior Art Including Information Disclosed Under 37 CFR 1.97 and 1.98
In the information age, effective decision making can be easily impaired by an overabundance of data. Internet access provides nearly limitless information on most subject matters. Ironically, these instantly available facts and opinions can paralyze rather than enhance decision making because capabilities to obtain information often overwhelm systems to meaningfully characterize and analyze the information received.
This dilemma is particularly true in health care fields where multiple sources of medical facts and opinions, often varying in strength and verifiability, inform medical decision making. This vast volume of medical data often presented in an unfamiliar format can lead to patient confusion. This confusion is further complicated by competing claims often arising from the dissemination of medical information by parties with proprietary interests in health care products or services.
The opinions of well intentioned qualified health care practitioners may also differ. Medical practitioners make recommendations based on their personal experiences and data known to them. Because of the vastness of medical information, health care practitioners may weigh medical information differently resulting in the rendering of patient medical opinions which may, in some cases, conflict with one another. If medical professionals can offer different medical advice for the same case scenario, it is not surprising that medically untrained patients can be easily confused and frustrated by the amount and variability of available medical information.
Ideally, patients should be able to review the best consensus opinions for all their health care concerns. Building a system to enable this consensus opinion generation would require access to qualified, unbiased, health care professionals who are familiar with and can apply their collective experience to an individual case. This system would also be able to rapidly evaluate data, be scaleable by numbers of health care providers or narrowness of expertise as cases require, and have an output that is produced contemporaneously, is easily understandable and reflects the weight of medical evidence when differences of opinion arise. In the perfect system, the health care providers would have adequate incentive to respond rapidly to patient scenarios once presented yet derive no personal gain that could bias recommendations when patients follow the opinions rendered.
Currently, efforts to create consensus opinions in medical fields occur through expert committees. These committees may be brought together by government entities or elements of organized medicine or medical industry. These committees are often charged with reviewing large bodies of medical information and crafting consensus statements when possible. Though the work of these groups is quite valuable, inevitably it is slow, often non-specific and cannot address the nuances of medical care relevant to individual patients.
Because of these limitations, an individual patient who seeks to obtain a consensus medical opinion on his or her specific health care circumstances can not be sure if this goal is met. At best, he or she could seek the advice of a physician and perhaps a second opinion or two and trust that this advice is in line with consensus. He or she may also do personal research using a vast variety of medical sources. Unfortunately, except for the exceptionally educated patient perhaps, finding a consensus of opinion would be more guesswork than science.
The present invention relates to a system that provides for contemporaneous multi-physician consultations and an output to allow patients to easily understand the strength of consensus medical views. It uses information technology systems integrated with human resources to produce an output that quickly enables case by case generation of consensus opinions for health care matters or establishes that no consensus exists. The system also compensates health care providers for their expertise without creating financial incentives that can bias decision making. Based on our review of the medical literature and prior art, no system for providing contemporaneous, simultaneous multiple physician consultations with a user friendly output exists.
It is, therefore, a prime object of the present invention to provide a system providing contemporaneous, simultaneous multiple physician consultations with a user friendly output.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system for providing contemporaneous, simultaneous multiple physician consultations through the Internet.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system for providing contemporaneous, simultaneous multiple physician consultations wherein the individual opinions of the consulting physicians are reported to the user in real time.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system for providing contemporaneous, simultaneous multiple physician consultations wherein the sum of the opinions of the consulting physicians is reported to the user in real time.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a system for providing contemporaneous, simultaneous multiple physician consultations wherein whether, and to what extent, a consensus of the opinions of the consulting physicians is present is reported to the user through a graphical representation.